Athapaththu Turns a Record Total Into a Formality — Sri Lanka Chase 178 and Reach the Final

Pakistan did almost everything a side is supposed to do to win a semi-final. They lost their opener to the first ball of the morning and did not panic. They built a 115-run stand for the third wicket. They finished with 177 for 4, a total nobody in this tournament had come close to, on a ground where the previous best had been 160.

And then Chamari Athapaththu walked out and made the whole morning irrelevant. Sri Lanka needed 178 and got it in 17.5 overs for the loss of two wickets. There are days when a very good total is simply the wrong side of one player, and this was one of them.

Gull Feroza was bowled by Sugandika Kumari off the first ball of the match, which is the sort of start that decides the next ten overs of a semi-final. Pakistan's answer was calm. Shawaal Zulfiqar and Saira Jabeen rebuilt to 35, and when Saira fell in the sixth, Ayesha Zafar walked in and played the innings of her tournament.

Zafar's 71 came from 40 balls with nine fours — a boundary count that tells you she was placing the ball rather than launching it, working Kavisha Dilhari and Chamudi Praboda square on both sides. She and Zulfiqar put on 115 from 70 deliveries for the third wicket and had Pakistan at 150 in the seventeenth over. Zafar was run out going for a second on the last ball of the seventeenth; Zulfiqar, who had done the patient work for 54 from 50, followed in the nineteenth. Fatima Sana's unbeaten 20 from 12 got them to 177.

Sri Lanka's captain has spent a decade being the reason Sri Lanka win and the reason Sri Lanka lose, sometimes in the same week. On Sunday she was only the first of those. Imesha Dulani did the early damage with five fours in a 21-ball 27, and after Dulani was bowled in the fifth over with the opening stand worth 36, Athapaththu moved through the gears against every bowler Pakistan had.

The second-wicket stand with Hasini Perera was worth 95 from 56 balls and effectively finished the contest. Perera's 42 from 26 was the innings that took the required rate out of play — three sixes, all of them off the spinners — and when she was caught in the fourteenth over Sri Lanka needed only 47 from 36 with eight wickets in hand.

Athapaththu finished 83 not out from 50 balls with seven fours and six sixes. Umm-e-Hani and Tuba Hassan, Pakistan's two frontline spinners, bowled eight overs between them for 72 runs and no wickets. Pakistan's only two wicket-takers were Fatima Sana and Nashra Sandhu, and neither of them got Athapaththu.

Not the batting. 177 for 4 after losing a wicket to the first ball of the match is a semi-final performance, and Zafar and Zulfiqar deserved better than to watch it disappear. What Pakistan will look at is their spin. Umm-e-Hani, Tuba Hassan and Nashra Sandhu bowled 11.5 overs between them for 110 runs and one wicket — 9.3 an over in a chase of 8.9.

Against most batters in this tournament that is survivable. Against Athapaththu, who has made a career out of punishing the length that is neither full nor short, it is fatal. Fatima Sana was the one bowler Sri Lanka never quite got away from — three overs, 24 runs, and the wicket of Dulani — and she bowled only three of the eighteen overs the chase lasted.

This match didn't have a CricIntel preview — we have not previewed any of the Asian Games knockouts. What we did write, after Pakistan scraped past Thailand by three wickets in the quarter-final, was that we would have made them comfortable favourites there and would have been right for the wrong reasons. Sunday was the inverse: Pakistan produced by some distance their best batting of the competition, 177 for 4 after losing a wicket to the first ball, and lost by eight wickets. The problem was at the other end of the day, and it had one name.

Sri Lanka meet India in the gold-medal match on September 22 at Korogi Sports Park, a rematch of the Women's Asia Cup final in Dubai a week ago, which India won by 72 runs. Sri Lanka will arrive with the one thing India have not had in this tournament: a completed chase under pressure. India will arrive having just watched Shafali Verma make 100 not out from 49 balls in the second semi-final. It is a genuinely hard final to call, which is more than anyone would have said about either semi-final on Sunday morning.

Pakistan drop into the bronze-medal play-off against Bangladesh on the same day. Given how they batted here, a medal is very much still available.